Michele Karas

An Ending in Four Parts

Woodwind

Only one of us is older now

and here we remain, one mountain
            riven by a mystical vale.

The abandoned lot on our old block
is gone.

In its place, I’m told, is a gleaming
mausoleum.

You haunt those golden hills
            where our childhood died.

I keep a memory journal.

When I asked if anyone had ever
hurt you,

            you lifted an invisible piccolo.

Notes rose with the breeze and hung
themselves like thistle seeds

                        on the purpling horizon.

Fix

Maybe she craved something
of your attentiveness,

your care in matters of pain
or alleviating others’ pain.

How you grasp every shame,
suss every inhibition: the swift

reassurance once affixed,
barriers by which you slip,

asp-like. You are no serpent,
though O how she ached

to hear that windsong as soon
as you withdrew, after you’d

slithered through the hollow tip
of a syringe, the vein of a woman

lying wanting on a bed
sheets strewn with rosebuds

that bloomed when her body
collapsed against them.

Or, how you were like the softness
receiving her, the odorless

indifference to knowing
that she was funny and good

as you coiled and counted
on none of us missing her.

With Her in the Wild

She was nostalgic, tender butch,
                                                kept his gun and badge beneath her bed,

but when our trail ended in a field of fireweed, my sister unharnessed
the chest strap of her backpack and said—                                                                        

                                                            I don’t think Dad ever liked me.

* 

Strange how each animal’s presence alters the atmosphere. How a jab
of lightning, just like that, embalms a moment:        

Someone said, What’s that?
                                                Someone else guessed, Coyote.

Unmistakable tracks.

I remember less what we called it than the slinking of its shadow into
the split canyon. How, soon enough, the death shrieks of a jackrabbit
turned us both to salt.

For what felt like forever, God asked nothing of us,
                                                                        only that we not interfere.

* 

                                                                                    The storm broke coldly
over the valley, a naïve contusing of clouds, my sister’s breath now a vapor.

Later she’d say she felt a telltale stabbing in her flank.                        

                        Too late I’d say,
                                                There is always something to be made of pain.  

*

It was the scene in the quest story where the hero,
                                                                        having removed her armor, puts it back on, her
athletic frame appearing somehow frailer beneath the mail. The tempest building, together we
attached tent to body poles,
                                                                                    pulled panels
taut.

                                                            That’s when our shelter began to cave.  

*

In the open of that field, my sister was telling me something I could not hear.  

                                  Already it’s been a hundred years.    

In the charged silence of the afterstorm, I picked up two rocks, smooth and oval as eagle eggs,
motioned
                                                                                                for her to stand away                                    

as I rang his name around the great bowl of the surrounding desert,
up
up into the vaulting sky.

portable saint cento

begin here, with the sound of dishes, the wind-chime of the sink / a girl cuts
her hair with imaginary scissors / you shrunk and bottled in a glass jar, you’re a
portable saint / i think of it on grey mornings with death in my mouth / the way
father banked a fire / the love, whatever it was, an infection / we receive beauty as
the nail receives the hammer blow / holy our own fragments when we can / music
of hair, music of pain / my sister and i, we’re the end of something

Cento line sources in order are from works by Bruce Bond, Ilya Kaminsky, Chris Kraus, Frank O’Hara, Claudia Emerson, Anne Sexton, Diane Seuss, Paige Lewis, Galway Kinnell, and Louise Glück, respectively.